Subtitled A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal this is the story of 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson and his teammates purportedly conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series--a story that has lingered for more than eighty years. With baseball so closely linked to American values and ideals, the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 disenchanted baseball fans, changed the way Americans felt about the national pastime, and fostered changes in the game. Here author Nathan is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans. He considers the media's coverage of scandal--from front-page attention to scathing commentaries and cartoons--when the story broke in 1920 and in the following years. He also examines how oral tradition reiterated the scandal before new narratives began to appear at midcentury. In a series of astute reflections on Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural, Eliot Asinof's popular history Eight Men Out, and the work of the historians David Voigt and Harold Seymour, Nathan sheds light on the ways cultural and historical meaning is produced. Also considered are representations of the scandal in popular fiction and film during the Reagan era, the popular tourist destination and baseball field in Dyersville, Iowa, created for the film Field of Dreams, Ken Burns's television documentary Baseball, and the country's reactions to the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike. 285 pages, hardbound, February 2003.